We spent this past weekend over on Catalina Island (one of our favorite places), enjoying a few days of fun and frivolity with friends. Much rich food and drink was consumed, but Chuck and I stuck to our marathon training program (it’s not that it’s that huge a training program – we’re actually training for a marathon) and got several good runs in.
This trip we stayed in Hamilton Cove, a ccommunity of vacation rental condos and villas about two miles from downtown Avalon. The area reminds me a lot of Indian cliff dwellings, with all of the homes carved into the hillside sloping down to the water. Most have spectacular ocean views, and there is a community pool, tennis court, croquet field, and an 18-hole putting golf course. The weather was mostly great – the mornings started out cool, then it warmed up for midday and cooled off in the afternoon and evenings. Everyone brought several bottles of wine as well as some stronger spirits, so there was a tendency to crash by 11pm (none of us are as young as we sued to be, it’s safe to say). Chuck and I would get up on the early side and hit the road, running from Hamilton Cove to various points in Avalon then circling back.
We took an Eco Tour on Saturday that was hugely fun. Our tour guide was Fred, a local fellow who has lived on the island for 46 years and knew all the back roads inside and out (and seemed to be personally acquainted with everyone in Avalon!). We spent over four hours seeing the inland portion of the island, finally coming out on the windward side of Catalina and enjoying amazing views of the much starker landscape that is found over there. We had the rare treat of seeing a Santa Catalina Island fox, an endangered species that is making a slow comeback with a lot of help from the Catalina Conservancy and who appeared for all the world to stop and pose fur us (I meant for us, but fur us is pretty cute, as typos go). We also saw some buffalo (a first for me, after all the times I’ve visited) roaming, a deer, some bald eagles in flight, and a whole bunch of feral cats, which we dubbed the Jets and the Sharks, as they were very territorial and quite aggressive. It was easy to imagine them snapping their little paws to the tune of “When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet…”
Chuck and I took a tour of the Casino yesterday and think we may have finally come up with THE great idea for our joint 50-60 blowout party. Turns out regular folks can rent the casino ballroom for special events! What a concept! And of course, we’d have to stay at the Inn on Mount Ada!
Pics here. I also took a few short movies (here and here) and have converted them to iPod movie format. For those of you without video iPods or iTunes 6, try this link, and this link (these are big files – 16MB).